For the first time, South Sudan and Kosovo have been recognized by the International Olympic Committee. Kosovo, which was a province of the former Yugoslavia, will have 8 athletes competing; and a good shot for a medal in women's judo: Majlinda Kelmendi is considered a favorite. She's ranked first in the world in her weight class.

(PHOTO: Workers set up camp at Santiago's Rio Mapocho/Mason Bryan, The Santiago Times)Chile nears 1 month without mail service as postal worker protests continue. This week local branches of the 5 unions representing Correos de Chile voted on whether to continue their strike into a 2nd month, rejecting the union's offer. For a week the workers have set up camp on the banks of Santiago's Río Mapocho displaying banners outlining their demands; framing the issue as a division of the rich & the poor. The strike’s main slogan? “Si tocan a uno, nos tocan a todos,” it reads - if it affects 1 of us, it affects all of us. (Read more at The Santiago Times)

WHO convenes emergency talks on MERS virus

(PHOTO: Saudi men walk to the King Fahad hospital in the city of Hofuf, east of the capital Riyadh on June 16, 2013/Fayez Nureldine)The World Health Organization announced Friday it had convened emergency talks on the enigmatic, deadly MERS virus, which is striking hardest in Saudi Arabia. The move comes amid concern about the potential impact of October's Islamic hajj pilgrimage, when millions of people from around the globe will head to & from Saudi Arabia. WHO health security chief Keiji Fukuda said the MERS meeting would take place Tuesday as a telephone conference & he told reporters it was a "proactive move". The meeting could decide whether to label MERS an international health emergency, he added. The first recorded MERS death was in June 2012 in Saudi Arabia & the number of infections has ticked up, with almost 20 per month in April, May & June taking it to 79. (Read more at Xinhua)

HUM HUMOR

"CLIMATE CHANGE: EVERYWHERE"

CARTOON: Peter Broelman, Australia/BROELMAN.com.au)

LINKS TO OTHER STORIES

Dreams and nightmares - Chinese leaders have come to realize the country should become a great paladin of the free market & democracy & embrace them strongly, just as the West is rejecting them because it's realizing they're backfiring. This is the "Chinese Dream" - working better than the American dream. Or is it just too fanciful? By Francesco Sisci

The South: Busy at the polls - South Korea's parliamentary polls will indicate how potent a national backlash is against President Lee Myung-bak's conservatism, perceived cronyism & pro-conglomerate policies, while offering insight into December's presidential vote. Desire for change in the macho milieu of politics in Seoul can be seen in a proliferation of female candidates. By Aidan Foster-Carter

Pakistan climbs 'wind' league - Pakistan is turning to wind power to help ease its desperate shortage of energy,& the country could soon be among the world's top 20 producers. Workers & farmers, their land taken for the turbine towers, may be the last to benefit. By Zofeen Ebrahim

Entries in journalists
(3)

A recent survey by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China had some discouraging numbers about reporting conditions in the country. Ninety-four percent of journalists who responded felt the work environment had deteriorated over the last year. Seventy percent had experienced harassment or violence of some kind. And a whopping 99% said reporting conditions in China do not meet international standards.

While many people outside China might have a cognitive understanding that reporting here is difficult, there's less knowledge of just exactly what kind of difficulties we come across. Our most recent reporting trip serves as a good example of the particular challenges the press corps here faces.

The first thing we must consider as journalists is which hotel we plan on staying in. And by that, I don't mean checking out TripAdvisor to see which one has the best buffet breakfast. By law in China, all check-ins require passport identification, which the front desk photocopies along with our visa. Hotel staff must then send over the details of all foreign nationals staying at the hotel for the night to the local police station. It's unlikely officers carefully look over all incoming lists of names, but our journalist visas are different from your usual tourist or business visas -- and it tips local officials off there are strangers in their land, nosing about.

On our trip to Hunan Province, the nearest town center to the village we were trying to reach was about 40 minutes away, and we judged it would be too close to the area to spend the night without getting a knock on the door by police.

A good strategy is to check in to a hotel hours away from our final destination, so police officers don't necessarily make a connection between our arrival and that area's news story. That also gives us the opportunity to set out before dawn and hopefully get to our interview by mid-morning before most people would spot a TV crew in the neighborhood.

Depending on whether the family or person we're visiting has nosy neighbors, our team can get quickly reported to local officials who then dispatch a team to investigate. You might wonder why anyone would do such a thing to someone they know. I don't understand it myself, though I suspect it's a combination of just how the state has always operated, what people have been taught to do, a historical distrust of foreigners, and finally -- I do wonder about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution and the habit of tattling as a show of loyalty to the Communist Party and to the community.

In any case, we've nicknamed such men who show up "the Black Audis," after the vehicles they drive. I don't know why government officials here love Audis so much, but they do. Audis are almost synonymous with them. I hate looking up to see one of these vehicles appearing around the corner -- it usually means our filming will be delayed -- if not permanently over. And our opportunity to provide a report to viewers -- gone.

Sometimes men show up but don't do anything to stop us. It is against the law in China to obstruct foreign journalists from reporting freely. This was set out in a directive signed by Premier Wen Jiabao. Government officials therefore have come up with creative ways to make reporting difficult and circumvent the central government's rules without technically breaking the law. They might hire local boys to intimidate our team. By sub-contracting out intimidation to non-uniformed groups, there's no proof the government is behind any reporting interference.

It was sheer luck that thugs showed up at Yang Libing's house while he was away. Mr. Yang, if you've had a chance to watch our report (below), is the father whose baby daughter was forcefully taken away from him by corrupt officials looking to profit by handing children over to adoption agencies. He was running late that morning, and what ended up happening was a rather awkward uncertainty as our team and these thugs looked at each other. They knew we were from Al Jazeera. I don't know how they knew that. They had been driving around searching specifically for us. They stood there and sized us up. In the end, the men sauntered away, ambivalent about the situation themselves. Had Mr. Yang been there, I imagine they would have stayed, their very presence meant to unnerve the person we hoped to interview. I must say we are often saved by the fact that many of the "Black Audi" types don't really understand how television newsgathering is conducted. Perhaps they believed we would also saunter off after a time, given the absence of Mr. Yang. We did not walk away, of course, but waited until he returned to speak to him.

We later learned that after our interview and past midnight that evening, those men came back -- and were not so ambivalent. They interrogated Mr. Yang for more then ten hours and warned him to stop talking to journalists. Since then, Mr. Yang's phone has generally been off.

Intimidating sources and not reporters has become a more common practice by the Chinese government to block information. Often we speak to incredibly vulnerable people at the lowest socio-economic rung. It is easy to bully them into submission. But even then, it is remarkable that in my years of reporting in China, many people remain willing to speak to journalists despite the danger of retaliation. They perceive that a great injustice has been done to them and feel the need to articulate that. Many also feel they have nothing to lose. In the case of Mr. Yang, I do believe he must've felt he had nothing to lose. He'd lost his child. His house was a wood and brick shack, his floor of dirt, and his farming tools not much changed, it appeared, from the ones farmers used in the 19th century.

In the afternoon our team decided to drive around and film the town and surrounding countryside. It would be included in our piece to show viewers how remote this place was. At some point, our hired driver noticed a van had been tracking us for some time. My first inclination was to ignore the van -- they can be quite harmless, and the men from earlier in the day had chosen to check us out, then leave us alone. Sometimes these plainclothes officers or thugs would follow us around, taking digital pictures of us as we worked in order to have a record. As long as you're not self-conscious about it, it is fine.

The van drove past us, looking to leave. But, on a narrow street, it slowed... slowed... then stopped in front of us, blocking our way. We sat there a moment, and then the van doors opened and a number of men jumped out, looking ugly. We locked our doors.

One banged on the window. We didn't do anything. But -- following some hesitation, our driver opened the window cautiously, about halfway. They asked what we were doing there, and if we could come with them. They said we needed to stop what we were doing. My producer shouted back that we needed their identification. With no proof they were with police, on what basis should we do anything?

Remarkably, it was that question that eased the tension. The men scuttled off. I'm confused, but suspect these thugs had never been questioned over their authority by the villagers they terrorized. The question was unexpected and baffled them. After the incident, we continued to film, though much more warily.

The next morning, as we were heading to the airport to fly back to Beijing, we received word that a domestic Chinese journalist we'd given a ride to in the countryside had been told that by doing so, she was complicit in "colluding with foreigners on anti-China missions." It was a completely absurd charge, and the journalist stood her ground at the police station. It reminded me that though we may run into trouble out in the field, Chinese journalists remain in far trickier positions, and an easier target for authorities to go after.

You develop a level of paranoia sometimes, engrossed in the mission of filming enough footage before getting stopped. On this mission in Hunan, we managed to gather enough material and information to build the report you see below.

(HN, February 16, 2011) -- Amid a rash of suicide attacks, Pakistan became the world’s deadliest country for the press in 2010. Journalists covering street protests are increasingly becoming targets. Credit: M Bociurkiw/HUMNEWS

According to the annual report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Attacks on the Press 2010, at least eight journalists killed in connection with their work in Pakistan last year - constituting a significant portion of the worldwide death toll of 44.

The CPJ says Iraq, Mexico, Honduras, and Indonesia also ranked high for journalism-related fatalities. And for the first time, broadcast journalists accounted for the highest proportion of fatalities, overtaking their colleagues in print.

The worldwide toll reflected a notable drop from 2009, when a massacre in the Philippine province of Maguindanao drove the number of work-related deaths to a record 72. The CPJ is investigating 31 other deaths in 2010 to determine whether they were work-related.

Not surprisingly, Internet-based journalists constitute an increasing portion of CPJ’s death toll. At least six journalists who worked primarily online were killed in 2010, a CPJ analysis found.

Murder was the leading cause of work-related deaths in 2010, as it has been in past years. But murders composed about 60 percent of deaths in 2010, lower than the rate of 72 percent seen over the past two decades, the CPJ found.

Deaths in combat-related crossfire and in dangerous assignments such as street protests constituted a larger portion of the 2010 toll than usual, says the CPJ.

(With the ongoing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa, street protests are likely to account for a higher proportion of deaths and injuries among journalists in 2011. Earlier this month, Egyptian journalist Ahmed Mahmoud, 36, of Al-Taawun newspaper died of his wounds, inflicted from gunfire while taking photographs of protests from his balcony. And only yesterday, the media community was shaken when CBS News reported that one of its star correspondents - Lara Logan of 60 Minutes - was beaten and sexually assaulted while covering protests in Cairo recently. Several other Egyptian and foreign journalists have been injured, detained and harassed in the past weeks of unrest in Egypt).

One of the most dangerous professions in the world

Suicide bombings and crossfire in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Thailand, and Somalia accounted for the unusually high proportion, the CPJ report says.

The only journalist to die in prison in 2010 was Cameroonian editor Germain Cyrille Ngota Ngota - who was jailed after he and other journalists asked a presidential aide about alleged misuse of state oil company funds. Cameroon will hold Presidential elections later this year in a race which is expected to be turbulent.

"There's a price to pay for speaking out," Al Jazeera anchor Riz Khan says in the forward to the report.

The CPJ reports that at least five journalists were reported missing during the year, three in Mexico and one apiece in Sri Lanka and Ukraine.

In the report, the CPJ also took aim at international institutions for failing to defend press freedom. It chides UNESCO for wanting to present a prize honoring one of Africa’s most notorious press freedom abusers - President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea. It also cited the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) for awarding Kazakhstan, one of the region’s worst press freedom violators, chairmanship of the organization.

(HN, April 28, 2010) - Most deaths of journalists are now among locals covering sensitive stories such as high-level crime and corruption for national media.

The finding was announced on the eve of World Press Freedom Day by the Geneva-based International News Safety Institute (INSI). It said that so far this year, at least 42 journalists have been killed worldwide - with April the bloodiest month fort media in five years, with 17 journalists killed.

With a journalist being killed every 1.5 days in April, INSI said today the numbers have reached "shocking new levels."

Said INSI Director Rodney Pinder: "Freedom shrieks whenever a journalist is kiled for doing their job."

But it is local journalists that are bearing the brunt of the violence against media representatives. So far this year, seven journalists have been killed in Honduras, six in Mexico, and four in Pakistan. Three died in Colombia and Nigeria and one each in Nepal, Venezuela, Cyprus, Russia, Ecuador and Turkey.

The latest targeted killing of a journalist occurred April 25 in Lagos, Nigeria. Edo Sule Ugbagwu, 42, a senior judiciary correspondent working for The Nation newspaper, was shot in his dwelling. His gruesome death occurred just a year after the killing of another Nigerian journalist, Bayo Ohu, assistant Politics Editor of the Lagos-based Guardian Newspaper.

It is not clear whether fewer foreign correspondents are being targeted due to the decline of foreign news coverage by major western news organizations.

On May 3 - World Press Freedom Day - INSI is calling for a minute silence in newsrooms around the world.

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